Imagine the situation where every house lock is made by one of three manufactures - Ambroid, Microlock, and Orange. All of the locks take your fingerprint to open, but each analyzes your fingerprint a little differently. Now the police need to enter your home (with justification). They do not have a fingerprint match, so they require Orange to create a keyhole for every lock that when using the proper key, the door will open.

November's terrorism attack in Paris elicited efforts by US officials to restrict or provide alternate means for decrypting messages. People in the Congress and the Intelligence Agencies repeated older requests for backdoors that would allow them to decrypt messages and content on devices.

This is a short follow-on to the Passwords and Hacking series.

The Internet worm "Morto A" continues to infect computers. It uses Microsoft's Remote Desktop to spread. It attempts to gain access to your computer using Remote Desktop's protocol. It will succeed if your password is one of 37 simple passwords listed below.

Solution: Don't use a simple password. See Passwords and Hacking for various means to create complex passwords.

Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer (all versions) has a bug that allows the browser to run software as you on your computer. Making it happen is rather technical, but it can happen when you go to a "specially crafted"¹ web site that downloads the code into the browser than causes the browser to execute the code as if it were part of the browser's regular code. The attacks "in the wild"² use Flash on IE V9, 10, and 11.

There are several services that meet these needs. Like the desktop solutions, some cost and some are free. These tools work by encrypting passwords you enter into your browser and saving those encrypted passwords on a server.

The first part of this series is here.

How many accounts do you have – one, five, ten, twenty or more? There are accounts for email, online banking, games, shopping, retirement, entertainment, Facebook, work, networking, blogging, and others. Many of these categories have multiple accounts. You know that you should use complex passwords, but complex passwords are hard to remember so you reuse the same password for many of these accounts. You are not alone.

Firefox, Chrome, and other browsers have had anti-fishing mechanism for a couple of years. These browsers prevent users from going to know phishing sites unless each site is specifically approved. Crackers have found a method to bypass browser security by using email.

Facebook allows you to "like" a page, post, picture, or almost anything else. When you like a page, a notice gets posted to your wall. This applies to both Facebook and external pages. Facebook also gives external page authors a widget to add to their page that makes liking the page easy. When you click on that widget, Facebook records that fact, puts a notice on your wall and increments the 'like' counter for that page.